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beige_alertAfter last Wednesday's skating workout (the one where I had the crash I described here on my Google+) our skating coach had a great little motivational talk with me. He said that there are a lot of things I need to work on with my speed skating technique, which I'm well aware of, as is everyone who has seen me skate. But he also noted that I'm demonstrating that I can keep up with skaters who have much better technique, which implies that if I improve my form I ought to gain a lot of speed. I hadn't really thought of it exactly like that.
He's had me working specifically on getting my right foot past the left in the crossovers lower and better. The fact is even when I do hit the left skate with the back of the right blade I don't actually crash (usually) so it shouldn't be too frightening to work on. One of the other guys has taken some iphone video of me skating so I can see what overall position I'm in. I, at least, find it surprisingly hard to feel from the inside what position I'm really in, compared to how it looks from the outside. The video is both very helpful and moderately hilarious, with the phone trying to figure out which way is up using its accelerometers while he holds it at a funny angle and goes around a turn at high speed. The phone probably gets motion sickness and the video always seems to get displayed upside down when we play it back, but even so I can see what I need to change.
The other thing I keep thinking is how much fun it is to skate with my crazy friends at the oval. All summer I was the crazy exercise guy at work, not just bicycling the 14km to work most days but sometimes doing the commute by running. I work at a medical school, so pretty much everyone thinks that exercise is great and everything, but I was sort of on the extreme end of it. It's great to find motivation within yourself. But we are basically a variety of social monkey, so getting some extra motivation from your fellow monkeys is also helpful. Now I find I'm hanging out with people with lives and jobs who are at least as excited about speed skating as I am and who are really working at it, plus we are out on the oval with all-out elite athletes who demonstrate to us what humans really are capable of. By comparison, we normal people are not really working at it so hard. Now instead of feeling like I'm the crazy exercise guy I'm thinking maybe I ought to be doing more weightlifting. We are all crazy and, frankly, we'll be the first to admit it.
He's had me working specifically on getting my right foot past the left in the crossovers lower and better. The fact is even when I do hit the left skate with the back of the right blade I don't actually crash (usually) so it shouldn't be too frightening to work on. One of the other guys has taken some iphone video of me skating so I can see what overall position I'm in. I, at least, find it surprisingly hard to feel from the inside what position I'm really in, compared to how it looks from the outside. The video is both very helpful and moderately hilarious, with the phone trying to figure out which way is up using its accelerometers while he holds it at a funny angle and goes around a turn at high speed. The phone probably gets motion sickness and the video always seems to get displayed upside down when we play it back, but even so I can see what I need to change.
The other thing I keep thinking is how much fun it is to skate with my crazy friends at the oval. All summer I was the crazy exercise guy at work, not just bicycling the 14km to work most days but sometimes doing the commute by running. I work at a medical school, so pretty much everyone thinks that exercise is great and everything, but I was sort of on the extreme end of it. It's great to find motivation within yourself. But we are basically a variety of social monkey, so getting some extra motivation from your fellow monkeys is also helpful. Now I find I'm hanging out with people with lives and jobs who are at least as excited about speed skating as I am and who are really working at it, plus we are out on the oval with all-out elite athletes who demonstrate to us what humans really are capable of. By comparison, we normal people are not really working at it so hard. Now instead of feeling like I'm the crazy exercise guy I'm thinking maybe I ought to be doing more weightlifting. We are all crazy and, frankly, we'll be the first to admit it.
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Date: 2011-11-05 05:14 am (UTC)